Horizon: Zero Dawn Wiki Guide

A Gift From the Past

A Gift From the Past is your first Main Quest in Horizon: Zero Dawn. It acts as a prologue of sorts, and as such doesn’t award you with experience.A Gift From the Past

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A Gift From the Past - Video Guide

Your journey as Aloy starts at the bottom of a cave after a tumultuous tumble. You have two paths to choose from to go forward, but both lead to the same small opening you will have to crouch to get through.

Deeper into the cave, Aloy will mention you’re never supposed to go into areas like this. They’re obviously ruins from a time past, and further ahead you’ll find a corpse with a useful piece of equipment.

This device, called a Focus, will provide you with a Heads Up Display of sorts for the rest of the game.

From here on out, you can press R3 to bring up the display. This will inhibit your movement, but will provide details on your surroundings. Honing in on the scurrying rodents in the cave will cause the device to label it: Rat. It will also show you what can be interacted with while it’s on.

Use the Focus at the locked metal door to get pointed to the mechanism you need to interact with to open it. Turn the Holo Lock counter-clockwise twice to get a reaction out of it, then head back to the door. You’ll find that the door has changed in accordance to the Holo Lock and will open.

After hearing the man’s birthday message to Isaac, you can look around to find more corpses and other devices to interact with to listen to more recordings from the time that has passed. You’ll need to come back here to gather valuable collectibles, so feel free to skip them for now.

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Rost will be waiting for you at the top of the other cave entrance ahead. Once he pulls you out, he’ll question the device on your head, but ultimately will tell you he plans to start training you to hunt tomorrow, where you’ll learn some Lessons of the Wild.